User talk:GPa Hill/SandVWorkInProgress

Getting Started

Okay, so. My first major rewrite project. Anyone feel free to contribute, here or on the subject page. I've decided to diarize this one, because I think it might be good grist for a future article about major rewrites, and because

I've been a wp user for years, and have over the last year adopted a policy of finding and making one useful edit per wp session. I chanced across this Sacco & Vanzetti article a week ago. Though it is chockful of information, it has several fairly serious flaws:

• The citations are clustered so one can't clearly identify them.
• The intro to the article is (was?) awful.
• The general sectioning of the article is useless, with no clear outline, and where there is outline, the paras really don't correspond to the section.

On the other hand, it's a great candidate for me. The copyediting and arrangement is weak, but there's a huge amount of material here, and much of it useful. There are ample sources, both webbishly and book- or article- available-online-ishly. It's also hotly controversial, even now, as the talk pages demonstrate. My mission is to write an article that we can stand behind. This means presenting the whole complex nightmare of the S&V case in a fashion that 1) a noob can quickly grasp the issues, 2) a literate layperson can get greater (documented) depth, and 3) even a pro can agree is a fair description of the situation.

I'm really looking forward to the challenge. Further bulletins as events warrant.  :) GPa Hill (talk) 00:39, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

Much small editing in lead

The lead needed a pretty significant rewrite, but today was more focused on small things:

• removed the date auto-formatting, which is now either deprecated or strongly discouraged depending on how you interpret the relevant talk page.
• replaced many endashes and some emdashes that were entered -- style and not converting.
• removed duplicate links and those with little or no relevance.
• added everywhere it needs it.
• experimented with placing TOC left of Overview section. Seems to look good.

GPa Hill (talk) 21:39, 16 September 2008 (UTC)